Within the banking environment, checks are very heavily used as a method of payment for goods and services, and for the transfer of funds between people. One of the very significant costs that banks and businesses incur is the handling and transportation of checks between the business location and the bank, and between the depository bank and the paying bank.
More generally, the U.S. check payment system currently processes 65 billion items annually, and this number continues to grow even though various forms of electronic payments are increasing. As a result, the time to process such transactions, including crediting of deposits in customer accounts is getting greater and greater. Thus, there is a need to substitute, replace, or eliminate much of the transit or transportation costs associated with checks and to provide a method and system for paperless or minimal paper use processing.
In this context, the banking and the automatic teller machine (ATM) manufacturing industry has experimented with check image systems for a number of years with little success. Some of the reasons for the lack of success include the failure to properly design the ATM applications and hardware for a satisfying customer experience, as well as the failure to address the entire system, i.e., the depositing customer, the check payment system, the paying bank and the customer who wrote the check.
In accordance with the invention herein, the problems of the prior art, check imaging systems are avoided and a comprehensive system for imaging depositing, presentment and deposit taking in a commercial environment is provided. In part, this is possible because of existing point of sale, check acceptance devices, improvements in data bandwidth and transmission time for images available for ATM installation, and better image compression and Courtesy Account Recognition (CAR) software, all of which are commercially available, and which are implemented in the invention in a unique and novel system which overcomes a number of problems of the prior art.